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Thursday, August 23, 2018

The dark side of armed school resource officers

Over the past decade, at least 46 school resource officers
across the country have been convicted of or fired for having sex or exchanging
sexually explicit messages with students who attended high schools or middle
schools they were assigned to protect, according to a BuzzFeed News review of
news stories, court documents, and police records. There are no statistics on
how many SROs are men and how many are women, but all of those arrested for
having sex with students have been men. Scores more have been accused of
excessive force or unnecessary arrests.

These incidents represent a dark side to a sector of
policing that continues to grow in response to fears over school shootings. In
the two decades since the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado,
school resource officers have emerged as a primary balm to soothe America’s
sense of helplessness in the face of a seemingly endless string of violent
childhood deaths. While Congress has failed to pass gun control bills in the
aftermath of these high-profile tragedies, it has been quick to fund efforts to
place more officers on primary, middle, and high school campuses, even though
there is no conclusive evidence showing that these armed men and women bring
more good than harm to the students under their watch.

In 1996, according to Department of Education data, around 10%
of schools had a police presence on site for at least one hour a week; by 2016, 58%
of schools had a sworn law enforcement officer stationed on campus at least
part-time. While there have been few official counts of school resource
officers over the years, the sector’s largest training organization, the
National Association of School Resource Officers, estimates that as many as
20,000 cops are on the school beat today, more than double the number tallied by
the Department of Justice in 1997. This year, after shootings at high schools
in Parkland, Florida, and Santa Fe, Texas, left a combined 27 people dead, tens
of millions of dollars in federal grants covered a renewed push to put officers
in as many schools as possible. In the new school year, there will likely be
more sworn law enforcement personnel stationed in primary, middle, and high
schools than at any point in the country’s history.

About Matt

An analysis of crime and punishment from the perspective of a former prosecutor and current criminal justice practitioner.
The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions or postions of any county, state or federal agency.